Rise of the Alt-Right

White nationalism is still marginal—but anti-globalism isn't.

Twenty-one years ago I was assigned by Commentary to write about Jared Taylor—today known as one of the eminences of the “alt-right.” Taylor had written a grim book on American race relations, Paved With Good Intentions, which had been published by a mainstream house and was widely, if critically, reviewed. Though unusually skeptical about the prospect of blacks and whites living together harmoniously in the United States, it stopped well short of any systematically racist argument. The book had several fans among New Yorkers I knew prominent in journalism and city politics.

When I referred to it in passing in a New York Post column, we quickly received a fax from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League stating that Taylor was far more extremist than I had let on. Curious to explore further, I queried Commentary—where I then did most of my non-newspaper writing—and they were interested.

I interviewed Taylor, read back issues of his monthly newsletter, American Renaissance (AR), and drafted a piece. AR was devoted primarily to demonstrating that in American history racism was as accepted as apple pie and that this was by no means a bad thing. It contained large doses of the evolutionary and biological racial thought fairly commonplace amongst American elites in the ’20s and ’30s. A central contention was that the United States could not thrive as an increasingly multiracial and multicultural country and that American whites were facing a kind of cultural dispossession.

I summarized this, quoting liberally, and concluded that the endgame vision of the AR crowd was potentially horrific, leading to national dissolution or civil war, while adding that continued mass immigration really would put the common culture of America under grave stress. If immigration rates went down, Taylor and AR would remain fringe players. If they rose, white racial anxieties would bubble to the surface, and Taylor might one day have his moment.

The piece was never published: Neal Kozodoy, Commentary’s editor, told me I had indulged Taylor too much and asked for a shorter, tighter rewrite. By then my brief summer vacation had ended, other tasks intervened, and I eventually lost interest.

Jared Taylor’s moment has not arrived, but clearly he has edged into the national conversation. He has been pictured and quoted in an anti-Trump attack ad produced by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he has been a guest on Diane Rehm’s show on NPR, and his core ideas have been broadcast—and excoriated—in magazines and websites great and small. He is now touted as one of the intellectual leaders of the alt-right, a diffuse movement of uncertain significance, but one deemed sufficiently important by the Clinton campaign for Hillary to devote a large portion of an August campaign speech to it. Donald Trump—who has almost surely never read a single article by an alt-right figure—is claimed by Clinton and other liberals to be under its influence and propagating its doctrines.

The truth is quite different: parts of the alt-right have raised their own visibility by attaching themselves to Trump. At the same time, Trump and his unanticipated success in winning the Republican nomination are symptoms of the same political and civilizational crisis that makes alt-rightish themes—at least in a more or less bowdlerized and soft-core form—compelling to a growing number of people.

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Taylor, 65, is old by alt-right standards, and is an atypical representative, though just how much so is difficult to discern, for much of the alt-right is anonymous. The movement fields no candidates, publishes few books or pamphlets. It is a creature of the web, strongest on Twitter. Pepe, an internet cartoon frog, is an alt-right character—and has actually been formally denounced by the Clinton campaign. Alt-right internet trolling, sometimes ugly, blatantly racist and anti-Semitic, is also part of the movement. There is some debate whether it should be taken as an offensive and unfunny joke—merry keyboard pranksters who enjoy pretending to be internet neo-Nazis, rather like punk rock bands of the late ’70s deploying Nazi imagery for shock effect—or is something more sinister, a genuine resurgence of hardcore racism and anti-Semitism. Likely it’s more the former, but it’s also likely that the alt-right banner has given the minute number of genuine neo-Nazis in the country a kind of protective shield.

Richard Spencer may serve as a bridge between older white nationalists such as Taylor and a younger alt-right internet crowd. It’s mistaken to call him or anyone else a leader—the movement has no procedure for choosing leaders—but he is clearly a pole of influence. He’s an intellectual entrepreneur who arrived in DC roughly ten years ago from a Duke graduate program. He worked at TAC for seven or eight months, where he was kind of a square peg in a round hole. Sometime thereafter his ideology began to crystallize. He started a website called AlternativeRight.com and later revitalized a white-nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, and launched a journal, Radix.

Spencer can be engaging and amusing, but his core doctrine is likely to remain, barring some sort of Mad Max-type Armageddon, well outside what most Americans would consider plausible or desirable.

What is the doctrine? At a recent press conference in DC, Spencer explained that the core of alt-right thought is race. Race is real, race matters, race is foundational to human identity. You cannot understand who you are without race. Many people would agree—at least privately or partially—with the first two assertions, but the third is the critical one, and has never been true historically or sociologically. (Not that there haven’t been groups of self-proclaimed pan-Asian or pan-African intellectuals who sought to make it true. Spencer fits into their tradition.) In any case, Spencer hopes somehow to spur whites into a kind of pan-white racial consciousness and galvanize them to become “aware of who we are,” and to prepare themselves, one day somehow, to form a white ethnostate. He refers to Theodore Herzl’s propagation of Zionism as a model for how such an ethnostate, seemingly a distant dream, could be eventually achieved. He fails to add that it took a Holocaust to make a Jewish State a reality.

An argument Jared Taylor and other white nationalists make is that whites choose to live amongst their own given the opportunity. Church congregations self-segregate by race, whites flee black-dominated cities to white suburbs, etc. There is something to this, but an equally important part of reality is that, left to their own devices, people intermarry. Roughly 15 percent of American marriages are now between people of different races, the greatest portion between whites and Latinos and whites and Asians. Offspring of the racially intermarried may soon constitute the country’s largest “minority” group. So too with Jews, usually treated by white nationalists as an irredeemably separate entity: their rising intermarriage rates have for decades been an anxious obsession for Jewish communal leaders. Americans sometimes self-segregate, sometimes intermarry, sometimes neither. Spencer likes to present himself as a bearer of profound and inescapable sociobiological truths, realities that political correctness denies and seeks to suppress, but the evidence for his core assertions is ambiguous or non-existent. Real estate prices rise in multicultural Brooklyn, stagnate in white rural Connecticut.

Prior to last fall, and before Hillary introduced the alt-right to a national audience, Spencer and Taylor held periodic conferences that could gather perhaps 200 people. (These were often held under shameful harassment by the leftist anti-First Amendment crowd, but that’s a different issue.) Spencer says he sees the alt-right as a vehicle that will influence politicians and intellectuals, taking as its model neoconservatism. But the differences with neoconservatism are vast. In terms of intellectual accomplishment and range of expertise, the roster of contributors to Commentary and The Public Interest in the 1970s compares to the alt-right like a contemporary version of the ’27 Yankees to, at most, a decent college team. This gap could probably be narrowed somewhat, and in Europe there are alt-rightish figures of genuine intellectual eminence. But in contrast to its post-Cold War advocacy of aggressive and militaristic foreign policies, brought to disastrous fruition in the George W. Bush administration, neoconservatism’s domestic views were center-right and not especially radical. They were more often a commonsense reaction to the excesses of a seemingly pervasive ’60s-era left liberalism. The hardcore alt-right, on the other hand, has genuinely radical aims, which would be overwhelmingly rejected if its core perspectives were more widely known.

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Yet Hillary Clinton and her campaign would not devote an entire speech to linking Trump to a shibboleth. When Steve Bannon, former head of the popular website Breitbart who now co-chairs the Trump campaign, describes Breitbart as an “alt-right” platform, he certainly isn’t thinking of advocacy for a white ethnostate. Milo Yiannopoulos—a popular campus speaker and political provocateur (British, flamboyantly gay, funny) who coauthored one of the first and most complimentary long-form articles about the alt-right—did not bother to mention a white state as a goal. For many who consider themselves alt-rightish, or alt-right sympathizers, who participate actively or passively in alt-right Twitter, this is not a significant omission. The surge in curiosity about the alt-right—Clinton claimed in her speech that some alt-right websites had seen their traffic increase a thousand fold—has virtually nothing to do with a rise in hardcore white nationalism. Which raises the question of what does drive the rise, and why is it happening now?

The alt-right was obscure until the summer of 2015. The first mention of the term in the New York Times came at the end of last year, around the same time as a long piece in BuzzFeed. The BuzzFeed article explored such aspects of alt-right culture as the Pepe the Frog character and the emergence of the resonant term “cuckservative.” With its etymological links to “cuckold” and “cuckoo bird,” “cuck” was a term for that kind of establishment conservative who, wittingly or not, devotes his resources and energy to nurturing other people’s children at the expense of his own. By December “cuckservative” had become sufficiently mainstream for Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan to use the term on the air.

What spurred this sudden emergence? It was not white-nationalist conferences or doctrine, which had been around forever, but events. Last year the West received a nasty high-voltage shock of political reality. The first jolt was the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. France had experienced jihadist murders before, but this time, the strike came in the center of Paris, and France was alarmed to find no small amount of support for the killing among its five million Muslim residents, many of them second- and third-generation citizens.

That spring and summer, European newspapers began to fill with reports of intensifying migrant and refugee flows, driven partially by the Syrian civil war and partially by the expansion and streamlining of people-smuggling routes from Africa. The rescue of boats overflowing with African and North African migrants in the Mediterranean became a regular feature of European news. Finally, in the last week of August, Angela Merkel announced that Germany was open to migrants and refugees, and soon television viewers the world over saw long columns of mostly young men—from Syria, from Pakistan, from Afghanistan—marching into Europe. Because of Merkel and generous social benefits, the liberal northern social democracies were the preferred destination, and they were initially welcoming.

By 2016 the welcome had grown cold. Hundreds of migrants sexually assaulted German women in and around the central train station of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, a mass assault that German authorities initially tried to cover up. It was subsequently reported that a similar assault had taken place at a music festival in Sweden in 2014. It became evident that Angela Merkel’s welcoming policies had thrown into sharp relief a cultural clash between European and Muslim social norms. Over a million new migrants entered Germany in 2015, and an equal number has done so this year—exceeding the number of German births by several hundred thousand.

If the sexual assaults could be seen as the cultural edge of the migrant surge, it was more difficult for even liberal “anti-racist” European leaders to ignore or explain away the terrorism aspect. The Charlie Hebdo attack was followed by the mass slaughters at the Bataclan theater in Paris, at the Brussels Airport, then on a seaside promenade in Nice, culminating in the execution by knife of an aging French priest by two “assimilated” Muslim migrants in his church outside of Rouen. In many of these cases it was reported that though the perpetrators were already on various terrorism watch lists, the French security service—a tough-minded and far from liberal organization—simply lacked sufficient manpower to monitor those who had shown signs of potentially being terrorists. There were too many of them.

One could interpret this alarming new reality in various ways: The Economist, probably the preeminent English-language voice of the European Davos class and political establishment, put Merkel on its cover as “the Indispensable European,” praising her for “boldly upholding European values” with her migrant policies in the fall of 2015. Voters, gradually shifting allegiance to the anti-immigrant parties of the far right, did not agree. Gilles Kepel—a highly respected, politically centrist French expert on Islam—raised the possibility that terrorism and the new migration would send the country into civil war. An aborted civil war formed the background to Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, a number-one bestseller in France. Richard Spencer may be incorrect about America, but one remark from his press conference in DC last month was arresting:

The refugee crisis in Europe is something like a world war. It is in many ways a race war. In terms of direct violence it does not resemble World War I or II. It is a demographic struggle, a struggle for identity, a struggle of who is going to define the continent, period. It is a new kind of war, a postmodern war, a war through immigration. There are no trenches, no guns. But it is a world war.

Of course, it is not primarily a race war. Religion, or religious culture, plays a major and perhaps decisive role in the conflict, and conflict between Christendom and Islam is not new by any means. Still, there is something in the bluntness of Spencer’s depiction that rings more true than 90 percent of what appears in the American media, which invariably depicts the refugee crisis in humanitarian terms and terrorism as a barely related law-enforcement issue. It is surely not a coincidence that the alt-right began making strides into American consciousness precisely at the moment Muslims were surging into Europe as refugees, while others were blowing up Parisian rock concerts or mounting mass sexual assaults on European women.

In Europe, at least, such stark descriptions of what is taking place are no longer found only on the far right. Consider the response of Pierre Manent, one of France’s most renowned liberal intellectuals, formerly an associate of Raymond Aron, to the slaughter last July of 85-year-old Catholic priest Jacques Hamel outside Rouen:

The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way. … We had supposedly entered into the final stage of democracy where human rights would reign, ever more rights ever more rigorously observed. We had left behind the age of nations as well as that of religions, and we would henceforth be free individuals moving frictionless over the surface of the planet. … And now we see that religious affiliations and other collective attachments not only survive but return with a particular intensity.

Whatever one might say about the alt-right, it is not perplexed. Few other political factions in America had a vocabulary ready for—or even made an effort to interpret seriously—what was going on in Europe, at a time when many people were seeking one.

One can ask, of course, what do rapes in Cologne or terror in France have to do with “exceptional” America? Yet for more than a century, most educated Americans have been conscious of their cultural and civilizational ties to Europe. In some cases that may be a residue of past immigrant ties, but there is more. The American establishment—virtually none of it of French ethnic origin—reacted viscerally to Hitler’s occupation of Paris in 1940 in ways it did not to the Rape of Nanking. President Roosevelt found increasing leeway in public opinion and in Congress to inch a previously isolationist country toward an intervention to free Europe from Nazism. European civilization is the fount of our own. These are themes that alt-rightish Twitter understands and uses. Donald Trump understands it too: he is the only American politician who has openly criticized Angela Merkel and regularly evokes European problems with immigration.

American developments in the fall of last year, while less critical than those in Europe, also spurred the alt-right. The rise of Black Lives Matter put into question one of the outstanding domestic-policy advances of the past generation, the dramatic reduction in urban crime rates, which has made possible the revitalization of many cities. The lie which held that America’s police forces were chock full of marauding racist murderers suddenly became mainstream, repeated endlessly on television and pushed in only slightly more subtle fashion by Obama’s own attorney general. Meanwhile, some urban neighborhoods were looted by rioters, and others saw dramatic spikes in their murder rates.

At the same time, one American college campus after another was roiled by demonstrations over issues that seemed largely incomprehensible to most Americans. Video circulated of dozens of black Yale students surrounding a professor and demanding his firing because his wife had written an email suggesting Yale had better things to do than police student Halloween costumes. (He and his wife both subsequently resigned their positions.) Virtually every American politician responded to these disruptions by heading for the tall grass. One hardly needed to be a white nationalist to sense that something at once absurd and menacing was afoot.

On some issues, establishment liberal opinion had moved so far to the left as to be unrecognizable. As blogger Steve Sailer noted, in 2000 the New York Times editorial page opposed amnesty for illegal aliens both because it would encourage more illegal immigration and because it would have deleterious effects on the employment and wages of lower-income native-born Americans. Sixteen years later, when Trump suggested that the core of immigration policy should be concern for its impact on the well-being of Americans, he was denounced as a raving bigot by the same New York Times.

It was predictable that such developments, touching on visceral areas of personal security, national sovereignty, and freedom of expression, would stir desire for a muscular response. Donald Trump filled the bill, if not always eloquently. So too, occasionally, did segments of the more established conservative media. But there was a market for a pushback as scathing and polemically unafraid as the left’s own polemicists, which might not have been the case four years earlier. This, as much as anything, accounts for the emergence of the alt-right, at least in its less ideologically extreme iterations.

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There is ample reason to interpret Trump’s success as a nationalist pushback against globalism, as part of a political pattern one sees in Europe as well. But there is another structural dynamic to Trumpism, as deeply rooted as nationalism and far more significant than the controversies that drive daily campaign coverage. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, published 20 years ago, is that rare book that seems more obviously correct and relevant today than when it first came out. Clash was often mistakenly interpreted as a call to arms against Islam, but it was not: it was an effort to map the structure of world politics in the wake of the Cold War, an attempt which saw that the major fault lines were no longer between nation-states nor between alliances of states based on ideology. They were between civilizations—Islam, the West, East Asia, and so on. Huntington’s book was a guide advising the United States how to navigate this new kind of world, where civilizations rubbed up against each other all the time as never before in history.

Huntington warned about getting involved in other civilizations’ internal conflicts, and he opposed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He also disdained the West’s, and especially America’s, pretention to be the bearer of universal values. Other civilizations may have envied and hoped to emulate and acquire the West’s material success, its science, its gadgets, its weaponry. But in the main, they have never aspired to become Western and to embrace such qualities as the West’s pluralism, its separation of church and state, its Christianity, its rule of law, its celebration of individualism.

About certain aspects of his analysis Huntington was honestly uncertain: Latin America, for instance, could be seen as part of Western civilization or as separate, affiliated with the West but not of it. Latin Americans, Huntington noted, are themselves divided on the question. The answer to that question, however nuanced, has weighty consequences: it is obviously easier for the United States to assimilate—that is, make into Westerners—Mexican immigrants than it is for Europe to assimilate Muslims in any serious numbers.

Because Trump has embraced immigration restriction; because Europe is clearly floundering under the weight of terrorism and a massive and potentially unending migrant surge; because a previous American president destabilized the Middle East by launching an invasion justified, in part, by claiming that the region would welcome having American values imposed upon it at gunpoint—because of all this, the 2016 election, unlike any before, is being held on Huntington’s turf.

And though Huntington was a famous and deeply respected Harvard political scientist and a life-long Democrat, the concerns of Clash are those raised implicitly by Trump and explicitly by what I call the soft-core elements of the alt-right. There is, of course, much racism in American history, and there are enormous crimes for which Europe continues to strive to atone. But neither anti-racism nor respect for other cultures should be turned into a national or civilizational suicide pact. Here what Irving Kristol famously wrote about Sen. Joseph McCarthy comes to mind: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he like them is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

In the now global faceoff between Western civilization versus mass immigration fused with multiculturalism, Kristol’s words describe with uncanny accuracy the dichotomy between Donald Trump and his supporters on one hand and those most feverishly denouncing him on the other. Among the former, for all their faults, are those who want, unequivocally, Western civilization to survive. About the latter, no such thing is certain.

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86 Responses to Rise of the Alt-Right

A study of multiethnic societies reveals, in general, a political divide between “advanced” ethnic groups and “backwards” ethnic groups. The first are educated, wealthy, and over-represented in elite professions and the civil service. The second are less educated, poor, and under-represented.

Multiethnic societies can have an established racial hierarchy, or they can be unranked. In an unranked system, ethnic groups, in cooperation, compete against other groups for power, similar to states in a multipolar geopolitical context.

Hegemony by the advanced group is generally manifest in restricting the voting rights of backwards groups, and maybe even physical segregation. However, given neutral laws and an economy managed on liberal lines, advanced groups can maintain their dominance without the state intervening in the economy (thus, generally anti-socialist and favor voting restrictions). In contrast, the backwards groups always remain backwards.

The reverse is not true however. Backwards groups need state assistance to protect them from competition with advanced groups. Further, if backwards groups seize control of the state, they inevitably physically remove the advanced minorities, and if there is no place to go, you get genocide. In fact, genocide is simply the logical extension of ethnic quotas, which partially protect the backwards group from competition with the advanced group.

The point is that only by physical removal of the advanced group, can the backwards group avoid historic dominantion by the other under conditions of fair competition. This action by backwards groups is generally justified on the basis that the minorities practice ethnic nepotism, and achieved their success by conspiracy against others. For example, anti-semitism as deployed by the German National Socialists.

Thus, it is only advanced “privileged” ethnic minorities that suffer physical removal or genocide. The Peid Noir, the Ibo, Indian Muslims, had a place to go, for example. The Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsis were not so lucky.

Further, as Derrick Bell points out, when it comes down to the metal, the majority of a particular ethnic group is going to pursue the strategy that is in its group’s best interest, understood as increasing the relative power of the ethnic group relative to rivals, regardless of morality. Thus, genocide will continue to crop up in human history.

If one wants to understand contemporary politics in America, the above principles are applicable. For example, why Cuban elites fleeing Castro would trend Republican, but Guatemalan peasants trend Democrat.

Very good article. Important food for thought. I find Trump and Trumpism disgusting and corrosive. But I also find it tragic, as that buffoon has co-opted some very important issues and identified it with the worst instincts among some on the right.

Perhaps he was needed as kind of shock trooper. Hopefully a more serious leadership will take on these issues and forward them in the face of the go-along to get-along Democrats, liberals and elites.

American whites basically split between the “Amerikaners”, inspired by Americana folkways, and the Metros, defined by pop culture, and anti-traditional. They don’t vote in an ethnic block against “Non-Whites”.

However, all that will go off the table as soon as whites perceive an existential threat to their way of life, which will happen if the Democrats and the Academy continue with their “anti-racism” and elites continue to bring in immigrants (“the new face of America”) with no prospects of ever successfully assimilating.

Since most of the immigrants fall into the “backwards ethnic minority” category, they will vote Democratic, and continue to dilute the GOP vote. Second, since the GOP is more interested in corporate donors than thinking about the future for its supporters, it will be replaced by a leadership that is willing to advocate for its voters. Hopefully not the Alt-Right, but closer to the Alt-Right than the GOPe.

Further, once whites figure out being a white ethnic minority in America means the same thing as being a Jew in Germany or an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire, I think you will see more solidarity, and less concerns about being called racist, and less “privilege checking”. Theodor Herzl’s thought will only become more poignant.

It is important to point out that just because you are a privileged ethnic minority, you will not necessarily experience genocide. For almost two centuries, Jews in Germany from Frederick the Great (1740) up to 1932 experienced expanded political and economic freedoms, and essential political equality until Hitler seized power. Many thought Herzl was simply an alarmist.

re: Once whites figure out being a white ethnic minority in America means the same thing as being a Jew in Germany or an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire…

An absurd statement, white people will remain a plurality in the US for a long, long time. And such they will continue to wield more power, both politically and economically, than any other group, the equivalent of German-speakers in the old Austo-Hungarian Empire. Moreover they may just remain a majority by recruiting other groups into their ranks– Asians (this is already happening) and Hispanics (this has partially happened in some places, e.g., S. Florida with Cubans). “White” in the US is generally defined as “Not Black (and not Native American)”

“15+ years ago at my ostensibly Catholic high school, we read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History” cover to cover, but no Federalist Papers. No Aquinas. No discussion of the complex relationship between natural law and the Constitution. No mention of Cicero, or Blackstone, or Burke. No mention of the “intermediary institutions” and Tocqueville. I don’t think natural law was even mentioned at all. It was as if all of US history consisted of was smallpox blankets, slavery, internment camps, and Pinkertons shooting striking workers.”

Anonymousdr you seem to have missed the point. Zinn’s excellent book was about other stories typically ignored in most history books. If you want what was missing from Zinn’s book (by design), then read Paul Johnson’s equally excellent book “A History of the American People.”

As for this article and most of the responses — wow. There is no such thing as race. It’s a social construct. It does not exist genetically. Phenotypically there are differences across populations obviously, but racism implies a different “species” and typically an “inferior” one. The genotype between a caucasian central European, a Tutsi in Rwanda (those left that is) and an Asian in China are essentially identical.

Racism though is not a inherently pejorative term. It’s become one for good reason but all it really means is the belief in race.

As a belief system, racism becomes deeply embedded in culture and socialization. If you are born in the United States — even today — you are a racist. Why? Because we’re still dealing with the spurious concept of race. One has to grapple with it as a concept from birth. That’s racism’s fundamental tragedy right there — that we’re all even still talking about it. Why? Because it set a template of hatred, exclusion, self hatred, guilt, myopic policies, oppressive policies, violence and brutality that will take many generations to overcome — if ever.

Racism manifests itself brutally in different countries due to their uniques circumstances. In Rwanda as an extension of Belgian racism it manifested in 800,000 Tutsis hacked to death by Hutu’s using machetes. In South Africa it manifested itself with State terror and total economic marginalization that will take generations to overcome.

Racisms impact has one thing in common though — it abscesses and becomes extremely difficult to mitigate its brutal impacts over time. The sad reality is that Soweto and South Chicago are as dangerous and depressing places today as they were 20 years ago. They will remain so for decades more.

Re: t’s harder for older people to understand, but we younger whites have been vilified all our lives.

“I’m not sure where your cut-off for “old” is, but I live in this country too and no, white people, are not vilified. Not as a group certainly. Specific white people are vilified, and yes, accused, whether falsely or honestly, of racism and bigotry. But the idea that there’s anything like society-wide prejudice against white people (especially when over the half the country is white) is sententious nonsense.”

You haven’t experienced “education” as the Millenials have. For them, they have indeed been vilified their entire lives.

Robert Wilson is wrong about everything he asserted (fifth comment from the top):

“I have a general complaint about the length of this piece and others that just drone on and on.

“I’m not an intellectual lightweight but my eyes glaze over when authors use ten thousand words when one thousand would do.

“You want instructions on how to write a concise piece? Look at Pat Buchanan’s work. He gets his point across with efficiency and panache.”

1. There was no droning at all in McConnell’s well-written piece.

2. No, you can’t put into 1,000 words what, here, is said well, and without surplusage, in 3,811 words (not 10,000, as Wilson guessed it).

I’ve edited for decades. Sure, I could trim McConnell’s piece without omitting anything of consequence, but I probably couldn’t get it below 3,000 words without doing damage to his argument.

3. Unfortunately, Pat Buchanan isn’t the stylist he used to be. His writing has changed in recent years, particularly in his columns. They often are choppy, and there aren’t the bon mots of the old days. (I noticed a similar falling off in William F. Buckley’s columns, but that happened when he was still in his fifties.)

If Wilson thinks Buchanan’s present writing is far better than the writing McConnell displays in his article, then the problem is with Wilson, not McConnell.

Re: You haven’t experienced “education” as the Millenials have. For them, they have indeed been vilified their entire lives.

Irrelevant. And they were certainly covering slavery and bad things done to native Americans when I was in school too. Heck the original “Roots” was the number one blockbuster of my childhood. However these things were A) True– they really happened and B) in the past– no one living is guilty of them. Anyone who feels slighted by learning that Really Bad Krap happened in the past, and some of the villains were people who looked very superficially like them is a very special snowflake indeed.

An excellent article with much food for thought. The rapid cultural change our country is undergoing should be acknowledged and considered carefully by its citizens, old and new. I hope that in the future, a less stupid politician brings these issues up again for a proper national discussion.

A sidenote: I’ve always thought one of the strengths of TAC is the presence of unashamed yet literate racists in the comment section. These points of view must be taken out from the rotten rocks they hide under and revealed in the light of day without equivocation, lest they lead to blood in the streets – their true aim.

I gotta say though, College Republican is close enough in age/class to me that I have to speak to him (we need not verify gender here): Nobody is oppressing you, bro. Not. Any. Body. And hang in there… someday you, yes you, will know the sweet touch of a good woman! You’ll just need to shrug that big ol’ victim complex off your back–ease it off–there you go. I believe in you!

But more seriously: Someday you will look back on this part of your life with great shame. For all our sakes, yours more than any other, I hope the day comes soon.

” It does not exist genetically. Phenotypically there are differences across populations obviously, but racism implies a different “species” and typically an “inferior” one. The genotype between a caucasian central European, a Tutsi in Rwanda (those left that is) and an Asian in China are essentially identical.”

@JonF ““White” in the US is generally defined as “Not Black (and not Native American)””

By whom? I (white) don’t consider Middle Easterners or South or East Asians to be “white” and neither do they. Neither the Census nor schools and universities see them that way. Corporations readily define them as distinct minorities.

@Rick “Racism manifests itself brutally in different countries due to their uniques circumstances. In Rwanda as an extension of Belgian racism it manifested in 800,000 Tutsis hacked to death by Hutu’s using machetes. “

I don’t see how it was an “extension of Belgian racism”. Africans have been hacking each other to death by the many thousands for a very long time. (Shaka Zulu’s bloody Mfecane accounted for some million dead in the early 19th century, and nothing the Dutch ever did there can compare to it.) What Belgium did in the Congo was horrific and deserves every bit of its grim reputation, but don’t kid yourself – Africans needed no instruction in mass slaughter or genocide.

Firstly, I have to applaud an authentic consideration of the expressed intent…even if the subject matter sickens me to the pit of my stomach or necessarily agree with the illusions reached in the content. Yet still, the concept of authentic is more than worthy of being applauded.

There is an inherent sickness within the concept of Western Civilization and it’s called out correctly as being described as “self-loathing.” The end result of all of the mind poisons that have been increasingly amplified, over hundreds of years as a false paradigm.

Scum that will eventually, be skimmed off the surface of the slow cooker pot…

What we have in this selection is exactly what we individually deserve.

No choice, other than to choose between the equality of dualistic evils…

What has been unleashed, cannot be intelligently rationalized and/or shaped/contained. If anyone desires something different? Un-plug and work on changing yourself and setting an example for kin and neighbors…

Otherwise, just sit back and enjoy the ride…there’s one hell of a paradigm shift on the horizon that most sheep will miss.

The question of who is “white” is not answered by the in-group but by the out-group. Robert Mugabe, the great warrior against white privilege, and his people “knew” who was white, and who was not white.

In a free society with neutral rules of economy:

Ethnic group + Merit = Domination by the ethnic group.

We know merit is roughly measurable in terms of IQ (which correlates strongly with educational attainment, income, wealth). Further, we don’t know how to raise IQ through environmental changes, HEAD Start is a failure, etc. Black/White educational attainments have barely budged, even though in terms of educational expeditures, Blacks get the most money, whites come second, and Asians get the least amount of money but score the highest on testing.

Because no one knows how to increase group merit, the only way to avoid ethnic domination by a group with higher merit than your group is to eliminate that ethnic group. Thus, the fate of the Jews, the Armenians, the Tutsi.

But no, it can’t happen here, anymore than it could happen in a highly civilized country like Germany in 1932.

If there is no such thing as “race” or “nationality”, then how can we have affirmative action programs? Is Rachel Dolezal actually Black then?

You will discover if you try to cast yourself as a member of ethnic group which receives express legal privileges that not only will the ethnic group reject you, but the government and our institutions will back them up.

The bounds between the ocean and the shore are socially constructed. However, wherever the bound is drawn, it does pick out a real physical difference. Likewise, however a “native american” is defined, whether you fall inside or outside of the box has significant and real legal and social consequences.

If you look at strategies deployed by Jewish groups to combat Anti-Semitism, you find certain features:

1.) Attempts to shame people for noticing over-representation of Jews in say higher education, etc., or excessive interest by non-Jews in the social profile of Jews.

2.) When Jewish over-representation is acknowledged or addressed, it is portrayed as being a result of Jewish merit, and additionally, that Jewish influence in institutions like the media is benign and for the good of all.

We have an enormous political problem of “anti-semitism/white variant”, that is to say, the adaptation of sophisticated and unsophisticated versions of traditional anti-semitic rhetoric being repurposed to target whites in general rather than Jews in particular. Whites will need to learn from the Jews how to survive as a minority, and step one has to be zero tolerance for “anti-racism” and “white privilege” and the rest of the “Progressive” adaptation of Nazi racial theories.

Further, whites need to study early 20th century anti-semitic rhetoric and understand how anti-semitic propaganda works, so they can clearly see how Progressive rhetoric is simply reconstructed anti-semitism.

Because the rhetorical means of politically attacking any advanced ethnic minority are the same, whether you want to murder Jews or Tutsis or whites.

I suspect that the Rwandan genocide was actually the result of the Tutsis, not colonialism.

Further, I would suspect a Nazi apologist would try to show how Jewish bankers were responsible for colonialism, and so the Rwandan genocide was the result of Jewish world domination.

Other than the fact that the Nazis are poorly represented in the Academy, the “Blame Colonialists” for post-colonial atrocities are overrepresented in the Academy, why should I prefer one type of political propaganda over another?

If you want to read a real book, try Daniel Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. He teaches at Duke Law School and is a scholar, not racial propagandist.

Genocide happens when “backwards” ethnic groups [see definition above] seize control of the government and use their power to end ethnic domination by the “privileged” ethnic group (who got their privilege by stealing it from the “backwards” group). The Turks killed the Armenians without help of the British, and the Armenian genocide was the probable inspiration for Hitler.

I don’t know who the racist is. I am just describing how American politics work.

In a multiethnic coalition, if you represent a historically underprivileged minority group, you advocate for expanded racial quotas and transfer payments for your group. You support big government.

If you are an advanced but small ethnic minority, you advocate against those promulgating conspiracy theories about how you attained success, and attempt to justify your position to the rest of the country. You want to maintain influence in all the mainstream political movements in your country to make sure someone doesn’t come out against you.

If you represent an advanced majority, you want to resist attempts at expanding ethnic quotas, resist attempts to change the ethnic balance unfavorably against your group, and limit transfer payments unless they disproportionately benefit the majority. Further, you have no reason not to seek alliances with other advanced ethnic minorities.

Ergo, contemporary American politics, and why the Alt-Right will replace the GOPe, which has allowed a radical change in the ethnic balance of the country, which will inevitably push whites toward white nationalism. Further, the more immigration, the faster white racial polarization will happen.

I take the view that white racial polarization is undesirable, but inevitable if the status quo continues. Further, the closer whites get to minority status, the more important it will become to imitate Jewish political strategies intended to avoid another Holocaust. No one claims Jews are racist except Anti-Semites, so I don’t see how a white minority can be racist by imitating Jews.

Further, I didn’t ask anyone to “other” me on the basis of my skin color, my sex, my religion, or my sexual orientation. But that was what I was exposed to in college, and the trend is actually even worse than when I was an undergraduate.

I didn’t get where I am by parasitically sucking away the vitality of people different from me, and I have no tolerance for racial or ethnic scapegoating based on claims “merit” is completely subjective:

Earl Hunt states that brain size is found to have a correlation of about .35 with intelligence among whites and cites studies showing that genes may account for as much as 90% of individual variation in brain size. According to Hunt, race differences in average brain size could potentially be an important argument for a possible genetic contribution to racial IQ gaps. Nonetheless, Hunt notes that Rushton’s head size data would account for a difference of .09 standard deviations between Black and White average test scores, less than a tenth of the 1.0 standard deviation gap in average scores that is observed.[121][147]

Re: The question of who is “white” is not answered by the in-group but by the out-group.

No, that’s not true. As I posted above, “White” was initially defined by European scholars seeking to categorize the world’s diverse people– they categorized themselves as “white”. And it is certainly true down through history that a dominant group can and does categorize themselves and set the boundaries for membership. What non-dominant groups may think is largely irrelevant. Obviously in Zimbabwe the Bantu majority was dominant after independence– but that is a radically different situation from what obtains in the US– and will continue to be true here for the future a long ways out. The vast majority of Americans will continue to have some large degree of European ancestry and European culture, as expressed through European languages (English obviously, but also Spanish) and the Christian religion in various forms, will remain dominant as well.
Please also note: the Armenians and the Jews were never a “dominant” group. They were always minorities subject to popular prejudice by the majority and often to restrictive legal regimes– the Armenians for example, as Christians, were dhimmis under Islamic law and the Jews were originally subject to the Christian equivalent, the various “ghetto” laws. Both groups were also subject to occasional pogroms and massacres long before the infamous genocides occurred, and both were seen as potentially subversive, an enemy fifth column (the Jews as agents of Marxism and perhaps the USSR; the Armenians as potentially loyal to Orthodox Russia, the Ottomans’ long-time enemy). They were not targeted for genocide because they were dominant majorities being taken down by angry minorities– but because they were subordinate and distrusted minorities who made a convenient target for the ruling class to hang its failures on and turn popular anger against to spare themselves the public’s ire. On which hyper-dangerous path the alt-Right in general and the Trump campaign in particular now dares to tread.

In regards to Native Americans there’s a precise legal definition of who can and cannot claim treaty benefits (and nota bene: these are things required by sworn treaties, not special benefits granted by any sort of affirmative action regime). I may have had a Native great-great-grandfather (who may have been a half-breed himself), and as such I fall outside the boundary, even if I could prove that ancestry, which I can’t. I don’t go around calling myself “Native American”– that would be utterly silly especially since I am not remotely culturally a member of that group– but if I did the worst that would happen is that people would make deserved mockery of me. Hardly a “danger” except to my ego.

Re: Genocide happens when “backwards” ethnic groups [see definition above] seize control of the government and use their power to end ethnic domination by the “privileged” ethnic group

This is ahistorical nonsense. The German government was always controlled by ethnic Germans. The Turkish/Ottoman government was always controlled by Turks. And when did Native Americans ever control any New World government outside their own tribes after Europeans arrived on these shores?

Ethnic systems are ranked or unranked, ranking a reflection political dominance by an ethnic group. A backward ethnic group can become dominant, and this is often a precursor to ethnic cleansing.

Nazi Germany was a ranked ethnic order, Jim Crow South ditto. America or Malaysia today would be unranked.

Historically, genocide often occurs when a backward ethnic group seizes control of the government, and targets an advanced ethnic group. The fate of the Ibo, Tamil, Tutsi, Jews, Armenians, Peid Noir, etc.

Advanced ethnic groups are accused of domination/power on the basis of their privilege, which is allegedly stolen from the backwards group, and physical removal is justified in order for the backwards group to survive.

In other words, ethnic cleansing is justified on the basis that the advance group acquired its education and wealth through racist self-dealing, and the ethnic cleansing is the “anti-racist” solution to the problem of the racism of the advanced group.

There is little evidence of ethnic cleansing by advanced ethnic groups against backwards ethnic groups, even when the advanced ethnic group is dominant. You can say low IQ groups, when they attain power, sometimes ethnically cleanse high IQ groups, but not vice versa.

[This is why Spencer’s white ethnostate is out to lunch. Whites would only seek an ethnostate if they failed to capture the existing state, just like the Ibo. If you had a white nationalist government, it is a lot easier just to enact literacy tests and targeted immigration quotas, like the original Progressives, to restructure the electorate.]

In fact, there is little evidence, long-term, of a stable multi-racial society anywhere with a substantial white minority that doesn’t either end in apartheid (like Brazil early 20th century or South Africa) or in expelling/driving off/killing the whites (like Algeria or Zimbabwe).

Not only will whites be in increasing danger of racial violence, but they are at risk to over-react in response, undoing a lot of what we thought was racial progress in the process.

Brazil today is 49% white–we will see–it looks very unstable, and racial tensions are increasing over quotas. South Africa seems to be heating up as land reform “progresses”.

It is hard to look reality in the face and have much optimism, even if Trump wins.

All affirmative action regimes are race realist compromises, and reflect the realistic views of a backwards ethnic group that they cannot compete against advanced groups and need state help to boost their status in society.

Legally, affirmative action is supported on the fiction that it is temporary to make up for past harms, but this country has had affirmative action since Nixon, and African Americans have shown no evidence of catching up. [Compare with say college enrollment of women.] Moreover, they are the fiercest advocates of affirmative action, which tells you that they perceive themselves long-term as never catching up.

The reality is they aren’t going to ever catch up, either, and if affirmative action is taken away, you are rubbing their nose in this fact and making them fall further behind. They know this, the Alt-Right knows this, its just white liberals who play ignorant. I can empathize with their situation and their frustrations, and also the perpetual racial double speak.

[There is no difference between races–but there is a difference between races–but the difference is just environmental and requires temporary measures to fix–but the temporary measures must go on forever even though the gap isn’t closing like it would do if it were historically conditioned–but “structural racism” occult force fields / white privilege/ collective unconscious racism]

I would prefer people speak honestly though.

Ethnic nepotism is practiced by all ethnic groups to some extent or another. It can never explain dominance/power or advancement/knowledge because both groups are doing it against each other. Further, backwards ethnic groups are often much more nepotistic than advanced groups. Hence, racism as a monocausal theory of racial hegemony is baloney.

[Note the Left always conflates knowledge and wealth with political power, as if you can’t be smart and wealthy and lack influence, or poor and stupid and powerful.]

Ludwig Bamberger does not exist. Nor did Gerson von Bleichroder. They had no influence on 19th century Germany.

I forgot I stopped arguing with you because you say obviously false things.

Advanced ethnic minorities can maintain influence on governments. If they do so, they are safe. If a political movement coalesces and isolates them as a target, they are toast.

This happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Jews were very safe in Germany for a long time (as they were in Poland during the Middle Ages). Whites will probably be safe for awhile as a minority in America. But when they aren’t anymore, it will be brutal if the past is any judge.

The Holocaust was not not necessary for the creation of Israel, as is so commonly believed. Armed Jews in the area that the League of Nations had MANDATED the British to let become a Jewish homeland were already driving the English out of ” Palestine.” Yes, the Holocaust did create a modicum of support in Europe and elsewhere for the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East mainly because most people in Europe and America did not want these Jewish refugees in their countries. When Israel was established in 1948, 900,000 Jews who had lived– and been persecuted–in Muslim countries for over 1500 years were expelled and went to Israel. These alone could have formed the new country. Their numbers far exceeded the number of Arabs in Israel who left the new country at the behest of the Arab countries which invaded thinking it would make their slaughter of the Jews easier. (It is rarely mentioned that many Arabs– like the Bedouin and the Druze– fought alongside the Jews against those Arabs who had persecuted them for a millennium. They still fight in the Israel Defense Force today.)

I really have no complaint with what Scott McConnell said in his piece,
but do wish he had covered some other things as well.
Most glaringly, why did he not delineate a comparison between the the group, and the ideology, labeled “alt-right” and the older set labeled “paleo-cons”?
That would of course include the esteemed founders of TAC, and also those clustered around Chronicles.
How do they compare?

Also, let me beat a personal drum:
Why is Arnold J. Toynbee so thoroughly forgotten these days?
He, who was most esteemed in the 1950s, and whose “Study of History” I read in high school in the early 1960s, gave an excellent and thorough structuring of world history in terms of civilizations, which had a life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death.
What we have seen and are seeing seems inescapably the final stages of what we called in the 1950s “Western Christendom”.
Might be nice to put this in the context of Toynbee’s work.

Re: Ludwig Bamberger does not exist. Nor did Gerson von Bleichroder. They had no influence on 19th century Germany.
I forgot I stopped arguing with you because you say obviously false things.

I have no idea who you are replying to, but it is not to me in the particular above. I have never mentioned either of those two gentlemen by name– I have never even heard of them. And while I may occasionally misremember or conflate something, I do not state blatant falsehoods.

Returning to the topic at hand, how can you possibility deny that the dominant ethnic group over the centuries in Germany was the Germans (duh) and in Turkey the Turks (again, duh)? That is high octane taurine byproduct. Germany was never a Jewish state, and the Ottoman Empire was never run by anyone else but Ottomans (and eventually by assorted Turkish revolutionaries). That there was an occasional Jewish person in Germany with some sort of governmental position does not disprove this, nor does the fact that the Turks coopted some Dhimmi sub-elite (like the Greek Ypsilanti clan) to help govern their provinces does not mean that the Ottoman Empire was not a Turkish-run polity. Would you call Britain a Jewish state because Disraeli was prime minister? Was the CSA a Jewish state because of Judah P Benjamin’s prominence among its leaders? Such ideas are utter howlers.
Genocides throughout history have diverse causes and histories, but the largest fraction of them involve some sort of minority group long marked as Not-Us by the majority, distrusted and suspected, who are scapegoated by the ruling class when the ruling class needs to deflect popular anger. A good example of this are the Christians after the Great Fire in Rome– unless you care to tell me that Sts. Peter and Paul were originally the elite, and Nero some rabble-rouser from the Subura?

Germany, as it formed, was composed of a variety of ethnic groups with different identities centered around region, religion, etc. Jews were part of the ethnic stock that formed Germany.

Jews were an advanced or “privileged” minority in Germany, with high educational attainments, and were accordingly over-represented in elite positions. Thus, they had political influence beyond their numbers, and Bismarck had close relationships with von Bleichroder (who is problem the paradigm for anti-Semitic stereotypes).

Its not that Jews weren’t Germans, but the fact that the Nazi movement exclude Jews, and held that they were not real Germans, that led to rhetoric intended to provoke other German ethnicities against the Jews. I was parroting typical sentiments.

Today, you often hear that something “doesn’t look like America” in reference to an over-representation by certain ethnic groups, which is supposedly bad.

Jews were an advanced ethnic minority in Germany, and while they had education and wealth, once the Nazi’s came in, they had no more political influence. In fact, their education and wealth was “proof” that they had stolen it off the backs of “honest Germans” due to centuries of oppression. There privilege became the “justification” for their physical removal.

To talk about the Ottomans, you had a rise of nationalism which set off the Armenian genocide. The character of the world dramatically changed since the beginning of the Ottomans and the end, and the Armenians, will remaining wealthy and educated, became subject to political repression when they lost influence on the regime. Again, the claim was made that they didn’t really belong.

It is clear that majority European societies can have non-European minorities granted equal rights and even ethnic quotas to protect them. However, it is unclear that there is any example of a stable society with a significant non-European minority, which didn’t end in apartheid or in the European minority being expelled or killed.

The only countries I am aware of with a sizable European minority are Brazil (which just went 49%) and South Africa. Both are far from politically stable, and both have historically had some form of apartheid and/or military dictatorship.

You can look at Haitian independence, Congo independence, Algerian independence, Zimbabwe. Further, in Africa, in Uganda they threw out the Asians. Nigeria had a civil war over genocide against the Ibo. In Asia, you can look at human rights abuses in Sri Lanka against the Tamils.

I can name a dozen advanced ethnic minorities subjected to ethnic cleansing. You don’t seem to be able to name one.

Further, I have a historical model that explains why Tutsi were killed by Hutu, why Jews were killed by Nazis, why Armenians were killed by Turks, but why under Jim Crow or Apartheid South Africa, for example, there was never genocide, just segregation and voting restrictions. [Although clear and brutal repression against political challenges to the regime.]

You, on the other hand, can’t name one backwards ethnic group that suffered genocide at the hands of an advanced group. Nor can you offer any historical reason why a white minority in American won’t ultimately suffer genocide or physical removal.

Amazingly, white politicians, in exchange for 30 shekels of silver, are putting whites on the historical track for self-inflicted diaspora and genocide.

KD, perhaps JonF is confused because advanced people have often pushed out the less advanced peoples in a state of warfare (one example being the U.S. vs. various Indian tribes). Also, I don’t think he is understanding that a minority can be financially successful and not have equal political power.

Despite the fact that Richard ‘Spencer can be engaging and amusing,’ am I wrong to assume his most salient characteristic to be his racism?

I think he would agree with this, from what I’ve read of him.

And am I wrong to think that Jared Taylor’s solution to the problem of ‘American whites’… ‘facing a kind of cultural dispossession,’ and the plague of multiculturalism, could be best be described as racism?

He would say , from what I’ve read of him, that this is a terribly naive simplification. But accurate?

And can I assume, given the context of your essay, that in the ‘face-off’ you describe, by ‘Donald Trump and his supporters’ you mean Taylor and Spencer? And that by those ‘most feverishly denouncing him’ you mean liberals and multiculturalists?

Using plain language then, can we agree that by the ‘former, for all their faults,’ you mean the racists, who want ‘Western civilization to survive,’ and of the liberals, ‘no such thing is certain’?

I think the alt-right is similar to every other race conscious groups in the US. Whites are going to be a minority so it is only fair and expected that they too take up the language of white empowerment. We continue to use race as a tool to separate people when ancestry is a bit more complicated. Europeans of various nations have different characteristics. One could easily break it down further. The same for blacks. I think the truth is for Richard Spencer and black versions of him like Al Sharpton is that they are detached from their ancestral racial homeland and culture so they create an all encompassing racial group based on skin color based on American identity politics in the quest for personal power. Its what people do who have no roots. If he had roots he wouldn’t be talking about white consciousness. He would be talking about being a proud ethnic group like the Basques. There is something rich and substantive there with the Basques that white and black American racial groups lack.

What the pro-immigration/multiculturalism crowd gets wrong is that they are creating competition in their societies or at least the perception of it. They let in people who do not respect their culture values nor its people. They refuse to protect their people and think that they can force everyone to get along through moralizing (calling people racist/banning head scarfs). That is bullying behavior and a mental illness (obsessive compulsive personality disorder). They agree with Richard Spencer that race is important because when you fill out a form it asks what race you are. It obviously is important to them. Instead of having everyone being made equal they have created identity politics to keep people at each others throats and away from the machinery of power. If they didn’t want racialism they should have ended the concept of race by stop giving it credence.

People like Richard Spencer are geared towards racialism. I think its biological in nature. Immigration and social policy should be dictated as a result of this hard truth. Richard Spencer is a sign that American immigration policy has been too lax. The same for the European versions of him. I think the US needs to balance its desire for a liberal immigration policy with the fact that humans are geared towards tribal warfare. I think the conservative position should be let there be immigration but not at the cost of social harmony and people being treated humane.